Hegel on Bridging the Gap between Freedom and Family: Women, Love, and the Challenge of Liberalism

In Hegel’s Philosophy of Right a gap exists between his promise of freedom and his description of the family. Hegel’s promise is to show the family as an integral aspect of a choice-worthy and free life, yet his description of this familial life appears to disqualify it as a sphere of freedom. By focusing on, rather than avoiding, the very source of the gap—the place of woman within ethical life—this article seeks to bridge this gap by recovering two liberatory strategies that, the authors argue, Hegel inscribes into his account of the family. The first liberatory strategy is negative, and concerns woman’s liberation from fixed identity. The second, positive, strategy concerns the overlooked diversity of ways that familial freedom, as rightfully ethical love, can be concretely lived. The authors argue that bridging this gap speaks to contemporary perplexities concerning the elements, satisfactions, legal-institutional boundaries, and reasons we attribute to the modern family as well as rethinks the meaning of identity and diversity within the family in ways that provide a compelling alternative to more outwardly flexible liberal theories of the family.